When Red Hat announced its decision to switch virtualization technology, moving from Xen to KVM, in June 2008, it generated a lot of buzz.

It was a dangerous move, considering that the platform was pretty new, that its creator and maintainer was a young startup, Qumranet, and that no ISV was actually supporting its applications inside it. On the other side KVM was integrated in the Linux kernel after just six months of development, and Red Hat eventually acquired Qumranet to get the knowledge, the people and the influence to return the most on its risky investment. Nobody followed Red Hat: Citrix, Virtual Iron, Oracle, Sun and of course its primary competitor Novell continued to work on Xen.

Novell is in fact researching a new hypervisor built on KVM called AlacrityVM:

AlacrityVM is a performance focused hypervisor based on the Linux KVM project. Virtualized environments often impose significant performance penalties against a given workload when compared to native “bare-metal” equivalents. This project is motivated by the belief that it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way, nor do we need exotic hardware to achieve it. AlacrityVM demonstrates that most of the existing performance bottlenecks in today’s system are simply the result of suboptimal software stacks. By systematically identifying and fixing the weak links in the guest/hypervisor equation, near native performance from a virtualized environment is realistically achievable. We also aim to add new features, such as the ability to express real-time constraints, network qos, virtual filesystems, etc.

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